As to you climate-change denier morons: The only good thing about you people is that future generations will remember you by your extreme stupidity.
I didn't catch that before. Of course, the modeling of climate science is actually mathematically very advanced; the system is never in steady state and even resonant type behavior like the El Nino-Southern Oscillation is not very linear. What the "deniers" don't seem to get is that the science was actually settled almost 30 years ago. The rest of the world has moved on, but we are saddled with a stupidity resonance being excited by a constant stream of money from petroleum interests.
Neat fact: the non-linear aerodynamics will always tend to excite a structural mode around its natural frequency.
The fact that it's technically not steady state behavior and thus isn't rightly referred to in the language of linear steady-state analysis ("resonance") just goes to show you how it's the transient phenomena that real engineering is about. Any idiot can come to any comforting conclusion about steady state and average trends, but if you don't rigorously account for the nonlinearities and the transients, you don't have shit. I'm looking at you climate "scientists".
All physical systems (e.g., mechanical structures) are in fact non-linear. The simple fact is, though, that it is useful to analyze the response of a wide variety of systems to outside forcing in terms of the excitation of normal modes, either as an entirely linear system, or one with weak non-linearities (say, a limited amount of mode-mode cross-talk). If modes are excited, it is still appropriate to use the mathematics of resonant excitation, regardless of whether it is steady-state or not. This can be and is done for messy systems like oceans, planets, stars and even galaxies, as well as the more typically linear systems of mechanical and civil engineering.
The mathematical advantage here is that "all linear systems are basically alike, while each non-linear system is non-linear in its own fashion."
Of course it was a resonance - the excitation of a normal mode of a physical structure. That the excitation was due to complicated non-linear aerodynamics doesn't change the obvious fact that a normal mode was being excited.
I've never seen people working on the holographic principle claim we live in AdS space. While I see string theory as unscientific, the holographic principle is at least one area that seems less deserving of derision, given its connections to Bekenstein's entropy (information) bound and the de Sitter space versions, Bousso's D-bounds, which are not dependent on string theory at all.
Oh, I would basically agree with you, I also think that the holographic principle is worthy of study. It's just that I regard the establishment that the actual universe we reside in is a de Sitter space is one of the profound findings of recent physics / cosmology, one that you would barely know from a typical presentation on the holographic principle (or, at least, the ones I have seen, which are generally deep into AdS/CFT stuff by slide 3 or so).
"The holographic principle springs from the theory of black holes..." -- Same summary, three sentences later.
The holographic principle springs from considerations of an Anti-de Sitter Space (ADS). (If you are interested, search on "AdS/CFT correspondence".) The thing that rarely gets mentioned in those articles that observations show conclusively that we do not live in an anti-de Sitter space.
If String Theory makes no testable predictions, then why was I just reading this, over at AAAS? FTA:
Working with a few lasers and mirrors, physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, have been trying to test a wild idea from string theory: that our universe may be like an enormous hologram.
Massimo Pigliucci did a very nice blog of the Conference, with separate posts for day 1, 2 and 3.
There is also Joseph Polchinski's String theory to the rescue paper, which has a ridiculously bad probabilistic argument in Section 3. (Peter Woit thought it was a joke, but apparently not.)
For myself, I favor loop quantum gravity, which as far as I can tell wasn't represented at the conference at all.
Kepler has always required an independent check before moving a candidate exoplanet (with only Kepler data) to a confirmed exoplanet. That's why there are always a lot more Kepler candidates than confirmed exoplanets. From Wikipedia:
As of January 2015, Kepler and its follow-up observations had found 1,013 confirmed exoplanets in about 440 stellar systems, along with a further 3,199 unconfirmed planet candidates
I have been following Yahoo since their IPO, and I have never really been sure what they actually wanted to do (except to spend their pile of cash acquiring stuff). While Google has always seemed very focused in increasing their share of the search / information processing market, Yahoo (which started, remember, as What Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!, i.e., a web directory) was going to own search, then started using Google, then build their own (pretty bad) search engine after letting Google get big. That was pretty much par for the course. I can remember sitting through numerous presentations on this or that (Yahoo! Music!) where it seemed like the basic business model was "we will buy a promising startup, rebrand it as Yahoo and then let it die on the vine."
In other words, like a lot of Silicon Valley, they have made a lot of money, but it has been investor money, not actual revenue.
"The notion that the government can collect cellphone location information — to turn your cellphone into a tracking device, just by signing a letter — is extremely troubling,"
You should always treat your cellphone as a tracking device.
I have done some freelancing, and there is also the non-billable work that happens, for example, when your invoice is rejected, or your contract is found to have errors, etc. That may not be your fault at all, and can be an incredible time sink, while you are not getting paid trying to fix someone else's mistake.
People who are working six jobs at once are unlikely to feel secure about their financial and social position. The people I actually know in the "gig economy" are doing it out of some combination of insecurity and desperation. If this is really the future, look for extreme political instability in our country.
There are good reasons to argue that the 2015 SPACE Act is consistent with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
Assigning ownership certainly looks like an act of sovereignty to me. After all presumably the USA would try and enforce the property rights that it had given. If there are laws that allow the USA to requisition private property this would seem to further exacerbate the issue.
While this might be an attempt to set CIL it fails in and of itself as it is one nations law. If they actually where interested in that they should have got an agreement with other nations. A treaty between other nations might come from this, and therefore from one point of view being successful, but it might be quite different if just to show not being under the USAs thumb.
Of course another option is that other nations just pass there own laws with the result of different people claim different rights on the same thing. After all it would be just as valid for another nation to make its own incompatible law. An extreme example is that it could just assign random mineral rights to individuals and as far as I can see that would be just as valid as the USA's law.
In other cases, other nations have adopted US law as a template for their laws. If enough countries do this, you have CIL. This is part of the intention here.
Think a little about how this might play out. I, a citizen of one country, send a spaceship to asteroid X and start doing stuff. As long as I am there, you (a citizen of another country) are not allowed to interfere with my operations. Now, interfere can mean a lot of things (is it interfering to land 100 m away? How about 100 km away?), and that will have to be worked out, but the principle seems pretty clear - and that is true whether I am doing geology or astronomy or mining unobtanium. You don't have the right to interfere with my spacecraft going on to Mars, or back to Earth, or wherever, either, whether it is carrying unobtanium or not. All of this seems quite settled under the 67 OST. Also quite clear is that, once I leave, you are free to step in and do your own thing too. (Now, I may leave behind monitors or something, and again, what it means to interfere with them will have to be worked out, but, again, all of this seems quite settled in principle under the OST.) So, I do not have "mineral rights," just a right to operate.
All of that seems to be clear whether I am doing commercial work, or science, or something else. And, if I bring stuff back, it is also quite clear (I would argue clearly CIL) that the country whose flag I am under gets to decide what's done with that stuff. They can say I own it, it belongs to "the Crown" or the people, I have to pay tax, or whatever - that's up to to the national government. That's also quite settled under the OST.
One thing national governments can't do is say "You now own the Moon" (or Ceres or wherever). I.e., they cannot "assign random mineral rights" (or, at least, expect to have other countries abide by that). Note that this is one thing that the 2015 SPACE Act does not do.
I went to the House hearing for this Bill, and also talked to various staffers and actual space lawyers
Presumambly you mean American lawyers. And if they where at the house for the reading of this bill they may well represent corporate interests in this so hardley be impartial.
I am sure that they do, but it's a matter of what kind of arguments they use. There are good reasons to argue that the 2015 SPACE Act is consistent with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. I would be glad to hear arguments that it isn't, but they need to have some weight behind them.
After the Subcommittee hearing, I had a long chat with Prof. Joanne Gabrynowicz, Director Emerita, Journal of Space Law, who testified at the hearing. Her viewpoint was to be that nothing should be done until there is an international consensus to clarify the Outer Space Treaty. I thought that was an incredibly weak argument for doing nothing for what would probably be decades.
This Act is actually a means of trying to set Customary international law (CIL) in this area, and thus clearing up the uncertainties in the 67 OST. I think it is likely to succeed in that.
So does it forbid states, or does it forbid corporations with a HQ in a state? Because there is a big difference
By the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, anything launched under the flag of a given state is subject to the laws of that state while in outer space. Under the Space Station MOU, for example, each module on station is governed by the laws of the state that launched it. That gave Cmdr. Hadfield fits when it came time to clear the rights of his ISS version of Space Oddity, as he flew through a bunch of different modules in the video.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Customary international law (CIL) is regularly followed/applied by SCOTUS when international disputes come up. E.g. SCOTUS pretty much always follows the protocols listed under UNCLOS. The US has not signed on, but it has regularly followed UNCLOS as CIL. It's basically seen as "common law".
162 States, including many maritime powers, have signed on to UNCLOS III. It is reasonable to view it as CIL. It is not, by the same standard, reasonable to view the Moon Treaty in the same way, as no major space power has ratified it.
Note, also, that nothing prevents the US from adopting laws that go against CIL, as long as it is based on agreements we have not ratified.
It is had not to agree with Ricky Lee of Australia, who wrote his thesis on the subject:
"So the idea that commercial use of space resources is prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty... is quite simply absurd,"
Quite.
I went to the House hearing for this Bill, and also talked to various staffers and actual space lawyers (as opposed to professors) about it. I feel, and they seem to feel, that the 2015 Space Act is entirely consistent both with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.
and also with the precedent set by the US, Russia and Japan, all of which have material returned from celestial bodies. The reality is that these three countries have all treated those materials as property, which can be and has been traded. That is the actual customary international law here, not the Moon Treaty, which has been ratified by no major space-faring nation, and which is a dead letter. In addition, each state gets to set the laws on actions by their citizens in space, and are responsible for those actions (say, if they cause damage to another country's spacecraft).
Finally, the 2015 Space Act itself says
SEC. 403. DISCLAIMER OF EXTRATERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY.
It is the sense of Congress that by the enactment of this Act, the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body.
So, despite most of the headlines announcing this law, it doesn't (and couldn't) allow for the ownership of asteroids, just of material extracted from asteroids, exactly as is allowed for in the Outer Space Treaty.
I have to say that the space lawyers I have talked to share my puzzlement as to what the professors say things that seem so ungrounded. (They are of course welcome to disagree or oppose, but you would expect that they would have arguments grounded in facts.)
Note, also, that none of the other space powers has complained about this act, which they were and are certainly able to do it they feel it violates the '67 Outer Space Treaty.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod this parent up. A nice summary.
As to you climate-change denier morons: The only good thing about you people is that future generations will remember you by your extreme stupidity.
I didn't catch that before. Of course, the modeling of climate science is actually mathematically very advanced; the system is never in steady state and even resonant type behavior like the El Nino-Southern Oscillation is not very linear. What the "deniers" don't seem to get is that the science was actually settled almost 30 years ago. The rest of the world has moved on, but we are saddled with a stupidity resonance being excited by a constant stream of money from petroleum interests.
Neat fact: the non-linear aerodynamics will always tend to excite a structural mode around its natural frequency.
The fact that it's technically not steady state behavior and thus isn't rightly referred to in the language of linear steady-state analysis ("resonance") just goes to show you how it's the transient phenomena that real engineering is about. Any idiot can come to any comforting conclusion about steady state and average trends, but if you don't rigorously account for the nonlinearities and the transients, you don't have shit. I'm looking at you climate "scientists".
All physical systems (e.g., mechanical structures) are in fact non-linear. The simple fact is, though, that it is useful to analyze the response of a wide variety of systems to outside forcing in terms of the excitation of normal modes, either as an entirely linear system, or one with weak non-linearities (say, a limited amount of mode-mode cross-talk). If modes are excited, it is still appropriate to use the mathematics of resonant excitation, regardless of whether it is steady-state or not. This can be and is done for messy systems like oceans, planets, stars and even galaxies, as well as the more typically linear systems of mechanical and civil engineering.
The mathematical advantage here is that "all linear systems are basically alike, while each non-linear system is non-linear in its own fashion."
Of course it was a resonance - the excitation of a normal mode of a physical structure. That the excitation was due to complicated non-linear aerodynamics doesn't change the obvious fact that a normal mode was being excited.
Thanks
I've never seen people working on the holographic principle claim we live in AdS space. While I see string theory as unscientific, the holographic principle is at least one area that seems less deserving of derision, given its connections to Bekenstein's entropy (information) bound and the de Sitter space versions, Bousso's D-bounds, which are not dependent on string theory at all.
Oh, I would basically agree with you, I also think that the holographic principle is worthy of study. It's just that I regard the establishment that the actual universe we reside in is a de Sitter space is one of the profound findings of recent physics / cosmology, one that you would barely know from a typical presentation on the holographic principle (or, at least, the ones I have seen, which are generally deep into AdS/CFT stuff by slide 3 or so).
"The holographic principle springs from the theory of black holes..." -- Same summary, three sentences later.
The holographic principle springs from considerations of an Anti-de Sitter Space (ADS). (If you are interested, search on "AdS/CFT correspondence".) The thing that rarely gets mentioned in those articles that observations show conclusively that we do not live in an anti-de Sitter space.
If String Theory makes no testable predictions, then why was I just reading this, over at AAAS? FTA:
Working with a few lasers and mirrors, physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, have been trying to test a wild idea from string theory: that our universe may be like an enormous hologram.
Maybe because that experiment has nothing to do with any theory at all.
Massimo Pigliucci did a very nice blog of the Conference, with separate posts for day 1, 2 and 3.
There is also Joseph Polchinski's String theory to the rescue paper, which has a ridiculously bad probabilistic argument in Section 3. (Peter Woit thought it was a joke, but apparently not.)
For myself, I favor loop quantum gravity, which as far as I can tell wasn't represented at the conference at all.
In my experience, people do not respect cable companies enough to be ashamed at being late paying them.
Kepler has always required an independent check before moving a candidate exoplanet (with only Kepler data) to a confirmed exoplanet. That's why there are always a lot more Kepler candidates than confirmed exoplanets. From Wikipedia:
I have been following Yahoo since their IPO, and I have never really been sure what they actually wanted to do (except to spend their pile of cash acquiring stuff). While Google has always seemed very focused in increasing their share of the search / information processing market, Yahoo (which started, remember, as What Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!, i.e., a web directory) was going to own search, then started using Google, then build their own (pretty bad) search engine after letting Google get big. That was pretty much par for the course. I can remember sitting through numerous presentations on this or that (Yahoo! Music!) where it seemed like the basic business model was "we will buy a promising startup, rebrand it as Yahoo and then let it die on the vine."
In other words, like a lot of Silicon Valley, they have made a lot of money, but it has been investor money, not actual revenue.
You should always treat your cellphone as a tracking device.
I have done some freelancing, and there is also the non-billable work that happens, for example, when your invoice is rejected, or your contract is found to have errors, etc. That may not be your fault at all, and can be an incredible time sink, while you are not getting paid trying to fix someone else's mistake.
Employers just don't invest in employees like they used to.
Not to mention that it has become very common to steal their pensions.
By the way, is it just me, or did the author and almost everyone quoted in that article seem like a clueless twit?
Just like in 99.999% (100-100*30/3000000) of history.
Yes. And we built our civilization, and our country, to get away from all that.
People who are working six jobs at once are unlikely to feel secure about their financial and social position. The people I actually know in the "gig economy" are doing it out of some combination of insecurity and desperation. If this is really the future, look for extreme political instability in our country.
There are good reasons to argue that the 2015 SPACE Act is consistent with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
Assigning ownership certainly looks like an act of sovereignty to me. After all presumably the USA would try and enforce the property rights that it had given. If there are laws that allow the USA to requisition private property this would seem to further exacerbate the issue.
While this might be an attempt to set CIL it fails in and of itself as it is one nations law. If they actually where interested in that they should have got an agreement with other nations. A treaty between other nations might come from this, and therefore from one point of view being successful, but it might be quite different if just to show not being under the USAs thumb.
Of course another option is that other nations just pass there own laws with the result of different people claim different rights on the same thing. After all it would be just as valid for another nation to make its own incompatible law. An extreme example is that it could just assign random mineral rights to individuals and as far as I can see that would be just as valid as the USA's law.
In other cases, other nations have adopted US law as a template for their laws. If enough countries do this, you have CIL. This is part of the intention here.
Think a little about how this might play out. I, a citizen of one country, send a spaceship to asteroid X and start doing stuff. As long as I am there, you (a citizen of another country) are not allowed to interfere with my operations. Now, interfere can mean a lot of things (is it interfering to land 100 m away? How about 100 km away?), and that will have to be worked out, but the principle seems pretty clear - and that is true whether I am doing geology or astronomy or mining unobtanium. You don't have the right to interfere with my spacecraft going on to Mars, or back to Earth, or wherever, either, whether it is carrying unobtanium or not. All of this seems quite settled under the 67 OST. Also quite clear is that, once I leave, you are free to step in and do your own thing too. (Now, I may leave behind monitors or something, and again, what it means to interfere with them will have to be worked out, but, again, all of this seems quite settled in principle under the OST.) So, I do not have "mineral rights," just a right to operate.
All of that seems to be clear whether I am doing commercial work, or science, or something else. And, if I bring stuff back, it is also quite clear (I would argue clearly CIL) that the country whose flag I am under gets to decide what's done with that stuff. They can say I own it, it belongs to "the Crown" or the people, I have to pay tax, or whatever - that's up to to the national government. That's also quite settled under the OST.
One thing national governments can't do is say "You now own the Moon" (or Ceres or wherever). I.e., they cannot "assign random mineral rights" (or, at least, expect to have other countries abide by that). Note that this is one thing that the 2015 SPACE Act does not do.
I went to the House hearing for this Bill, and also talked to various staffers and actual space lawyers
Presumambly you mean American lawyers. And if they where at the house for the reading of this bill they may well represent corporate interests in this so hardley be impartial.
I am sure that they do, but it's a matter of what kind of arguments they use. There are good reasons to argue that the 2015 SPACE Act is consistent with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. I would be glad to hear arguments that it isn't, but they need to have some weight behind them.
After the Subcommittee hearing, I had a long chat with Prof. Joanne Gabrynowicz, Director Emerita, Journal of Space Law, who testified at the hearing. Her viewpoint was to be that nothing should be done until there is an international consensus to clarify the Outer Space Treaty. I thought that was an incredibly weak argument for doing nothing for what would probably be decades.
This Act is actually a means of trying to set Customary international law (CIL) in this area, and thus clearing up the uncertainties in the 67 OST. I think it is likely to succeed in that.
Ricky Lee's (large) thesis Creating a Practical Legal Framework for the Commercial Exploitation of Mineral Resources in Outer Space
So does it forbid states, or does it forbid corporations with a HQ in a state? Because there is a big difference
By the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, anything launched under the flag of a given state is subject to the laws of that state while in outer space. Under the Space Station MOU, for example, each module on station is governed by the laws of the state that launched it. That gave Cmdr. Hadfield fits when it came time to clear the rights of his ISS version of Space Oddity, as he flew through a bunch of different modules in the video.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Customary international law (CIL) is regularly followed/applied by SCOTUS when international disputes come up. E.g. SCOTUS pretty much always follows the protocols listed under UNCLOS. The US has not signed on, but it has regularly followed UNCLOS as CIL. It's basically seen as "common law".
162 States, including many maritime powers, have signed on to UNCLOS III. It is reasonable to view it as CIL. It is not, by the same standard, reasonable to view the Moon Treaty in the same way, as no major space power has ratified it.
Note, also, that nothing prevents the US from adopting laws that go against CIL, as long as it is based on agreements we have not ratified.
It is had not to agree with Ricky Lee of Australia, who wrote his thesis on the subject:
Quite.
I went to the House hearing for this Bill, and also talked to various staffers and actual space lawyers (as opposed to professors) about it. I feel, and they seem to feel, that the 2015 Space Act is entirely consistent both with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which says
and also with the precedent set by the US, Russia and Japan, all of which have material returned from celestial bodies. The reality is that these three countries have all treated those materials as property, which can be and has been traded. That is the actual customary international law here, not the Moon Treaty, which has been ratified by no major space-faring nation, and which is a dead letter. In addition, each state gets to set the laws on actions by their citizens in space, and are responsible for those actions (say, if they cause damage to another country's spacecraft).
Finally, the 2015 Space Act itself says
So, despite most of the headlines announcing this law, it doesn't (and couldn't) allow for the ownership of asteroids, just of material extracted from asteroids, exactly as is allowed for in the Outer Space Treaty.
I have to say that the space lawyers I have talked to share my puzzlement as to what the professors say things that seem so ungrounded. (They are of course welcome to disagree or oppose, but you would expect that they would have arguments grounded in facts.)
Note, also, that none of the other space powers has complained about this act, which they were and are certainly able to do it they feel it violates the '67 Outer Space Treaty.
1982.
Enough said.